


Aleph Tav

by internationalprincess



Category: West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-06-15
Updated: 2002-06-15
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:04:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/internationalprincess/pseuds/internationalprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he could find the right words, maybe he would use them, but he's spent the better part of a decade and worked his way through several languages and he hasn't found them yet.</p><p>2002 Jeds<br/>Winner - Outstanding CJ/Toby<br/>Second Place - Outstanding Characterization of Toby</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aleph Tav

 

Acamar, Achernar, Achird.

He's naming stars because he can see them for the first time in as long as he can remember.

Altair, Aludra, Alya.

He's a city dweller, not used to the way it gets so dark in Manchester, to the sky scattered with light like this. Toby can't possibly put the right names to the lights above him, but he likes the words nevertheless.

Antares.

It's colder than he imagined it would be, but the parking lot seems infinitely preferable to the close atmosphere of the bar. He needs to be away from Doug, and Connie and the others. He doesn't need new people right now.

And she's gone, in any event. Back to the hotel, back to whatever self-contained world she exists in at the moment.

Seeking absolution.

"Strategically, I felt that was the wise thing to do," she says over and over in his mind, and the gentle clunk of pool balls provides the rhythm to an uneasy soundtrack.

Though the air is clear where he's standing, on the distant horizon he can see lightning. A silent tribute to a storm too far away to hear. Agni, he thinks, the Vedic god of fire.

There was a moment when she did this to him, and somehow he missed it. She tore across him like lightning scorching places unseen, and it was over too quickly and forgotten before it even died in the sky, and all he's left with is the thunder rumbling all around him. The deafening audibility of her in his life.

When he tries to let himself into her room with the key he has scared out of the manager he finds that she has bolted it from the inside.

*

Breathing slowly is the only thing that keeps him from growling in frustration at 'The Doug and Connie Hour'. That, and the way she keeps looking over her shoulder with trepidation at the garter snake in the hay.

Barn dance, barn owl, barnyard.

She's expectedly fierce at the moment. Brisk, brusque, battle-scarred. Spiked all over, and he can't approach her for fear that she will tell him she doesn't need him. And yet all that armor is not enough to keep a harmless reptile at bay.

Brachystoma, he thinks, but those are New York snakes. He doesn't know if they slink northeast as far as New Hampshire.

As far as Bartlet.

And yes, he's pissed at him. Doug is right, of course, but not just for the reasons he spits at Toby. Among the many reasons Toby's pissed at him is the fear that this deception may cost her her job. It was only her exhaustion that caused her to falter. She's the consummate professional, and no one can expect so much of her but him. The only word he has left to look for today is the taste in his mouth, which is somewhere between blood and betrayal.

"It means apathy," she says, and that makes him want to smile.

"And dullness," he adds in confirmation. He senses in her carriage something different already.

Benediction. Though he's not entirely sure on whose part.

And the roar of the crowd as the First Couple kisses surrounds them all, a salve to festering wounds. The rational part of him knows that this comparatively small, partisan audience is not enough to get them there. But Bartlet's sweeping oratory lifts the cumbersome words Bruno and Doug foisted upon him, and soars with the magnificent phrases Toby and Sam fought to preserve. It is enough for now.

He finds that eventually it's just the two of them sitting in the bleachers like high school seniors who can't believe they've graduated. She kicks her shoes off, though he thinks it's too cold for that, and below them the only people still around are the clean-up crew packing folding chairs and chasing errant streamers across the grass.

"He told me he never meant to win," she says, breaking the silence that has stretched between them.

"Do you think that makes it okay?" he asks her, and it's a genuine question. One he knows she doesn't have the answer to.

She leans against him slightly and he offers her what she needs.

Ballast.

Balance.

*

He's on the side of millionaires, and if he could compromise anymore he'd be too disgusted with himself to go on.

Capitulate.

Toby hates this crippled feeling. This total lack of control. He hates knowing that they will be playing defense and catch-up for the foreseeable future. That every Republican and his dog will try and push them around. He thinks about Doug saying he was angry because he wasn't getting the chance to run the campaign he's always wanted, and he realizes that Doug is right. He wants Gianelli and his minions gone. And as impossible as it is, he wants to recapture that feeling of cautious optimism that began to build somewhere in the Midwest all those years ago. The noise her bones made when she clicked her knuckles, as she lay with her head in his lap across the back seat of a bus one night, and he stared out the window at the endless black of the Wyoming sky.

And she's climbing back on the horse in a way that makes him simultaneously proud and terrified. She's reckless with her reclamation. Working the press, working the boundaries, twisting Congress round one elegant finger. This woman who once looked at him blindly through wet hair and asked him if he thought she could do this, as if she herself weren't sure.

Calculating. Condescending. Confident.

She's all hard angles and clean edges now, the soft damp curls a thing of the past. That version of her a thing of the past, and she'd never ask him if she could do it now.

Things were clearer then, and so was she.

And while she spars with Babish in the bullpen he fishes a key ring out his pocket and caps his own bottle of beer before handing the opener to her. She doesn't make eye contact with him, stares instead at the screen, and it's not what they wanted, but it's better than they had. And it's her work, her success.

Her counterattack.

*

She's focused on natrium, but all her talk of elements has him stuck on one of more limited use. Dysprosium, from the Greek dusprositos, meaning 'hard to get at'. Dinner, dancing, her to-die-for dress, and what's he doing instead? Working votes on the Estate Tax.

"Quiz me," she demands and she extends down over one impossibly long leg to fasten something on one delicate shoe. He wonders if such things count as shoes, all skin and tiny straps.

He and Sam work hard at the vote, and he wants to share their success with her, but as so often happens in this job, the night takes a rapid turn for the worse. Somewhere far away, in a homeland he's never visited, two American boys lie dead in the streets and she's no longer wearing the dress.

He watches her briefings as often as possible, sometimes hanging up on phone calls mid-sentence to stand in his spot behind the cameras. She thinks it patronizing, a sign he doesn't trust her to do her job. At least that's what she claims, but he thinks underneath it all she knows differently. And even when he has nothing to smile about, the way she deals with that Wexler woman brings a moment of levity after a long night.

Eviscerated.

When she slips into the Oval, as the sun is easing in through the windows facing the portico, he's so distracted by her that he loses his train of thought. The President is asking him about Yom Kippur, and Toby is forced to look at Josh - far from observant - and hope that he can help him out because the words have failed him.

"It's 'erev'," Josh says hesitantly, with a sideways look at Toby.

Erev Yom Kippur.

Erev. Eretz Yisrael. Eliezer...

And he's embarrassed above all else that he couldn't answer the question when called on, but he's now thinking about forgiveness and wondering if she has put two and two together and realized that his stilted apologies for slights real and imagined come genuinely but once a year.

*

He spends a fatuous twenty minutes sorting through the etymology of the phrase 'old flame' while he waits for the junior staffers to haul ass to the mess.

Flame, flaume, flaumbe, flamme, flamma, flagrare --

And most appropriately, flamingo.

Will Sawyer's been gone long enough that Toby let his guard down and he feels foolish that he didn't know he was back.

Sawyer makes her laugh.

For some reason, it's Milton he thinks of. "In a flame of zeal severe." He knows the staff is expecting his peculiar brand of fireworks. Even Sam slips in to enjoy the show. And he was going to huff and puff, really he was. But she's upstairs flirting with Will Sawyer while she waits for his explanation, when all he really wanted was to spend his Sunday sitting on the couch in her office lecturing her about football while she pretended not to listen. So the fire goes out of him, and all he can manage is fatherly disappointment in its place.

He admits to her that he doesn't have an answer; but that he'll go on the record if she wants him to. Explain himself. She smiles cryptically and says something about Fiji.

When she lets herself in to his apartment that night she asks him if he thinks that the White House is a "real beat", if he thinks what she does is important, and he's furious with Sawyer for making her doubt it for even an instant.

"Are you insane?" he asks her. "How does it get more real than this?" And even he can hear that his reply is a little too forceful, tainted with a day of fuming to himself.

She doesn't answer, just turns on the television, tucks her legs up under herself, and surfs for something in black and white. Her world is too often Technicolor horror and when she gets the chance, this is all she wants. Little girls aren't shot and killed in black and white.

*

There are moments, he thinks, when even the solemn weight of what they do can no longer suppress the girl that she is, and this is one of them. She's strutting towards him, singing, *singing*, about how she's too sexy. And he doesn't understand it, but she is. He's overtaken by the outburst.

"What in God's name..."

He adores her when she's like this. She's all over this bumbling gaffe. And more than that, when he'd asked every person in the West Wing twice what that number meant, only she could lean around a door frame, snap her fingers and get it right.

An afternoon spent with Tawny has put his blood pressure through the roof, and he's glowering at her when she comes into his office later that day.

"So," she starts without preamble, "your job's harder than it looks."

"You were thinking of unseating me?"

"He needs to have an answer," she says, lying down on his couch. "Bruno wants to use soft money?"

He nods and leans back in his chair, squashing the Spaldeen around in his hand. "I think it's okay," he says, more to himself than to her.

Her ankles are crossed and she manages to look peaceful even while lying down in a suit.

Gorgeous. Graceful. A grace-note.

*

"I swear to God," she says, "Don't go in there."

He doesn't look up.

"I mean it, Toby. *Seventeen* kinds of spices. You'll never come out alive."

Hyperbole. He raises an eyebrow, still doesn't look up. "Are we talking about the President, or Colonel Sanders?"

She's sitting on the edge of his desk, swinging her legs back and forth, and she says, "I'm giving you a heads-up."

"Don't you have 'Indians' in the lobby?"

She kicks the door closed with a flourish as she leaves.

"Come home with me," he says to her later, because the weekend suddenly seems long, and he doesn't want to be without her.

"I can't."

He rubs at his temple in disappointment.

"They'll like the presents, Toby. I promise."

"Of course they will. You picked them. And you should be there to give them to them."

She shakes her head slowly, and he leaves because he can't think of anything else to say.

*

He knew this was coming. Knew it with the same certainty that he had known green beans would become an issue. Only this time he didn't wait with satisfaction for her to catch up.

It's why he chooses to lean in her doorframe as she briefs her staff.

Larry says, "That's why he gets all the great women," but he doesn't want them, he only wants this one, and he's there because he knows in a moment she's going to slip that much further away from him.

"Don't start?! What the hell...." and she's winding up, spoiling for a fight, and he has to look away from the disappointment in her eyes.

It will be like this all day, he thinks, as she begins to become more and more intractable. He can sense it with foreboding, the way old women with bad knees sense inclement weather.

Intransigent.

It's all he can think of to do. Stand there in his space, behind the camera, and signal to her while she faces the nation. A gesture so small, to be ignored by the press, by her assistants, easily dismissed. A touch of his hand to heart, a silent intercession.

A prayer for relief.

*

She's sitting on the end of the bed, hunched over, elbows on knees, staring at the too-small screen. As if she could will herself into it and magically appear back in DC. Tap Henry on the shoulder, and resume control of her Press Room. He hates California in December because it's not cold enough and feels wrong. She hates it because it's not her home anymore and no part of her wishes it was. He had to talk her down from haranguing the hotel manager into providing them with more televisions for the room.

"You're here to see your family," he said.

"It's not *right*, Toby," she groaned, even as she slumped a little, her posture defeated.

"If Leo wanted us around, he wouldn't have ordered you to go home."

He came with her because she asked him to, and he didn't mention Thanksgiving. They took a hotel room on the pretext that the house would be overcrowded, and that they would need to receive late night phone calls. Work if they had to. In reality, he knows that she can't take too much of her family, and she can only sleep now if CNN is on in the same room. Her father called him Tony, and smiled a little too broadly as he shook his hand. She didn't seem to notice, but also didn't protest when his hand drifted to rest on leg during dinner. Small gestures of comfort she does not usually accept.

He doesn't know what time it is, but Leo's testimony seems to have been on forever, and the pages he's filling with rough notes for the State of the Union are blurring a little. He's tired, and he's had Sam on the phone twice already this morning. Sam's wound up, Toby can hear him fidgeting thousands of miles away, and he doesn't know what Josh is trying to do but he trusts him, and he wishes Sam would too.

Sam doesn't trust anybody any more.

Jaded.

He wonders how long it will be before he himself has to testify. He thinks of the Declaration of Independence. "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

Let facts be submitted to a candid world.

And then what? Judgment?

When Bruno adjourns the hearing she's pacing the room, phone pressed to her ear.

"I don't understand," she keeps saying, as if someone will explain it to her. But he knows that whatever has happened is not their work. There's a deal here somewhere, and he hopes the President is strong enough to make it.

They celebrate New Year's Eve with her family; because there isn't anywhere else they can be and still kiss each other at midnight. Toby's glad to see her get a little drunk, and he complains gruffly that no one in America knows the words to Auld Lang Syne.

"And you do?" she challenges, her champagne glass tilting a little precariously.

The festivity seems to roll around them, spilling out in to the still Napa night and leaving them in its wake. It's so quiet when he looks at her, even with fifty or so guests singing off-key, none of them knowing the words.

"I do," he says, and wishes he hadn't.

"Bit of a Burns fan, are we?" and she's not laughing behind the twinkle in her eye.

"Well," he starts to say, putting his scotch down on the table, "it's not actually Burns' work..." but she kisses him before he can finish the sentence, and it's January.

He's never said he loves her because the concept seems preposterous. She never said she missed him all those years she lived on the opposite coast. He's never said goodbye at the end of a phone call.

If he could find the right words, maybe he would use them, but he's spent the better part of a decade and worked his way through several languages and he hasn't found them yet.

He once spoke to a charismatic who explained that praying in tongues was for when earthly words no longer sufficed. If he could, he would speak to her in tongues. His relationship with her is no more comprehensible to him than his relationship with God.

He wonders if he can convince her to perform The Jackal.

*

She's watching "The Lion in Winter" in bed.

He's only half concentrating; writing and rewriting, and four yellow legal pads surround him on the covers. His pillow is lumpy, and he really needs more pie, and he's fairly certain that Josh is still on the inside and they are not.

Kings and knaves.

She's wearing pajamas, and he can't think where they came from, because she never brings anything with her, and she never leaves anything behind. Maybe they are his, although he's not going to ruin the moment by asking. On the campaign their snatched hours together would always work like this. Her watching television, his writing all over the room. She would order ice cream from room service, which frustrated him no end because it would always be melted by the time it arrived.

Nothing about her is sensible.

On the screen Henry says, "My life, when it is written, will read better than it lived." And as he looks at her long legs tenting the sheets of his bed, he knows for certain that his life will read better than it lives. Infinitely better. And he keeps writing, doesn't look up, but he takes one of her hands and softly kisses the knuckles.

And so she's tired at their early morning meeting, half asleep in her hand. But he's confident that she'll find plenty of opportunities to refer to his 'inner, bitter darkness' in the coming days. It might be what prompts him to be uncharacteristically tolerant when Josh wants to use him as an agony aunt.

He mentions the movie to the President later. He's not sure, exactly, what he's trying to say. But he wants Bartlet to know that he understands they're approaching the denouement.

And then there is Sam.

He doesn't know how to reach Sam when he slides away from them. He heard the knell this morning, but he didn't know what to do. Words of comfort no more his métier than diplomacy. It's been happening since the thing with his father last year, maybe earlier than that. But this is more extreme; he's slightly out of control. He's all over her office, a mass of kinetic energy and despair.

But she has always had the right words for Sam, and she has them now. No victims, she says to him kindly, only volunteers.

*

Larval.

It's been his favorite word for a week now, and it's the only way to describe the progress he's been making with his sections of the speech. His writing is labored, there isn't ever enough pie in the West Wing, and the President wants to announce that they can save the world without donning his red underpants first. The word 'larval' comes from the Latin for 'ghost', which Toby finds oddly appropriate.

Language is failing him, and it makes him desperately uncomfortable. He can only hope that it's the censure that's causing him to stumble and nothing else.

How to cast the President in the right light. Legerdemain.

Part of him understands why Sam latches onto the task of writing the passage about cancer. A hopeless cause. They both want to think they are the same writers who moved mountains with their words. Neither wants to admit the odds are against them now.

So it takes weeks, and they sweat blood over conjugations, repetitions, and time. They argue alliteration, screw up portions of each other's work, fall asleep at their desks. They dig in.

And they pull it off.

When she kisses him on both cheeks he remembers another speech she described as 'inspired'.

"Why do you say that stuff to me?"

"To watch your face turn that color."

He knows his face is definitely that color right now, and he couldn't care less.

"Dance with me!" he calls to her as she sweeps past him, his laconic facade all but abandoned. And a few minutes later she does, sliding into his arms like a liquid metal.

*

He goes and shuts himself in an office while she's on the phone to her father. If they were other people he supposes she might want him around, but he knows better. She will want to spend some time putting the pieces of her heart away, and then she will come looking for him. Mended.

Sam, as always, picks exactly the wrong moment to call. She's chasing him down the plane muttering "butter, butter, butter" and he wants to spend this time with her, not laugh at her jokes, be as normal as he can when her world has been flung upside down.

Magnetic north.

The President is slowly driving him mad, and he fears they are walking straight down the path they took last time. This is supposed to be better, he thinks. They're supposed to have confidence now, to speak out with authority and conviction. But instead he's working for this other, muddling Bartlet, and it makes him want to stub his cigar out on the nearest passer-by.

And besides, he hates Iowa.

He usually loves the trips they take together, just the two of them. He wonders absently how he will ever go back to commercial air travel, sitting beside men in their late fifties who want to talk about their new diet or how they've taken up scuba diving. He only ever wants to travel like this, whisked through the night sky with her at his side.

But tonight they argue about affirmative action, and he wants her to see that she's wrong. She says, "I guess we'll have to agree to disagree," and he's never meant it more when he says, "I don't like doing that."

They sit quietly in her office in the half dark.

"I've missed you," she says, and he doesn't know what she's referring to, but he knows there are days when he's missed her too and she's been sitting right there in the same room.

She keeps notes in a hardcover book that have nothing to do with news stories, has never enjoyed flying, pistachios make her throw up, and he's the only one who knows. He failed algebra in high school, goes to Temple every time his brother leaves Earth, still sends Andi flowers on Valentine's Day, and he's never told anyone but her.

He carries these memories and an unavoidable sense of mortality in to the Oval with him, which proves to be a dreadful mistake.

*

He's nervous already and Leo's making it worse.

"Are there words in there you don't understand?"

He's not sure why he's winding Leo up, any more than he knows why he crossed the line with President. And he can't understand why Leo hasn't mentioned it, until it becomes apparent that he hasn't been told. The whole situation is a nightmare.

She's waiting outside the office when he comes out and aims for levity. "Somebody's going to get an ass-kicking from the missus," as if she hadn't lain on her stomach across the foot of his bed this morning like a naiad, wet from the shower, painting her fingernails while he read her the offending sections. He scowls at her.

Nova. Novae? Novas.

He girds himself to do battle with Andi. She's already in his office waiting to take him to task. Andi's blinding and brilliant, and so very infuriating to him. Obdurate. Obstinate. And he wonders why he was cursed with this propensity toward opaque women.

"Let me take another look at the softer language," he concedes finally, and Andi almost smiles at him as she leaves.

"Did it hurt?" she asks later when he lowers himself slowly to the couch in her office. The words are sarcastic, but the timbre of her voice is laced with pain. Billy Price hasn't made it, he realizes with a start.

"What happened?"

"He sat in my room for over a year," she murmurs. "His wife collapsed right there on that couch."

His fight with Andi's over, foreign policy is forgotten, and he just needs to make sure she's in one piece because she's elemental to him.

Like oxygen.

*

He leaves her a note on the back of her copy of the President's schedule while she's out at Andrews.

It's a move calculated to irritate. Over the years he has left her notes written on everything. Diner receipts, hotel stationery, airline sick bags. Post-its in her novels, scribbles in the margins of her magazines, and one angry diatribe scrawled across her mirror in a soft brown pencil he grabbed off the vanity. That's not counting the actual letters. He buys the thick cream envelopes in packets of twenty, so he knows he has written her eighty-three so far.

He also knows she likes being able to tuck his notes away out of sight, and she will have to carry this one with her all day long.

He returns to his desk to find he's not the only one leaving messages for people. "Sigmund, come play chess," it reads, and he fingers the edges of the stiff card thoughtfully. The chess set is beautiful, and they ease quickly into their discussion of the 'Bartlet-psychosis'. Plainspoken. Watching the pitch go by. He's prescient enough to know this isn't the last time they will hover over this gambit; far from the last time the President will raise his voice.

"Pick your king up," the President says, "we're not done playing yet."

And Toby is relieved to realize he is right.

He goes to her place afterwards and finds her cooking pasta, though it's the middle of the night. One day, when this is all over, he wonders if their internal clocks will reset - or if they will forever be calling each other at four a.m. like confused relatives on opposite sides of the world. She's wearing a white tank top and soft grey pants and her feet are bare. She points her wooden spoon at him and begins to lecture him about her broken desk, and her glued-together phone, and apparently it's all his fault because he couldn't write her poetry on a blank piece of paper like everybody else.

"Everybody else writes you poetry?" he asks, a tiny smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

They eat their penne together on the sofa as the forty-two constituents of Hartsfield's Landing tell them they won't be resetting their clocks any time soon.

*

He hates formal dinners, and he hates wearing a tuxedo, and he hates birthday parties. And tonight she's wearing a dress like naked skin and diamonds, and he wants her wholly to himself.

He wants to avoid the quotidian sycophancy of the well-wishers crowding the ballroom. It's is almost a relief to have Marbury handed off to him, and an excuse to flee the scene. But when he sits in the bar, savoring the taste of quality scotch in his mouth, he can see the shining quartz of her in the smoke from his cigar.

She's been drinking while he's been gone, but she still looks astounding. Refulgent, radiant, resplendent, and when he touches her arm gently to get her attention she asks him, "Do you think I should get a cat?"

"You don't like cats."

"I could get to like them."

"I don't like cats," he counters, and he wonders what this is about. She's usually rational, even while drunk. She sighs, as if this was exactly the wrong thing to say, and he shrugs his shoulders up to invite an explanation.

"Abbey's going to surrender her license."

"Come dance with me," he tries, reaching for her hand. A tactic he rarely invokes in public.

"You don't like dancing."

"I like dancing with you," he says simply, as they move towards the floor.

"You don't need a cat," he says to her, the palm of his hand pressed against the warm skin of her back.

And she's raw and unrefined in his arms, flutters her fingers down one of his lapels, and lets them come to rest over his heart. Photographers be damned.

*

Satellite interviews and Saudi Arabia, and he's staring with disbelief at the light above the camera. Too slow to avert disaster.

It was the same look she gave him when she asked him if he wanted a "touch of the poet." It was questioning, and challenging, and there was a hint of surprise.

Skepticism.

And when he said "yes" he caught the flicker of disappointment in her "okay".

He can't explain what he's doing, so he doesn't try.

"She's a poet," he says to her later, "she's new to things like consequences."

And he doesn't mean that as a comparison, but she can barely keep from rolling her eyes as she says, "Okay."

And when he crosses Tabatha off his list, it's with no sense of satisfaction. Tabatha's wrong about artists. He considers himself an artist, and truth is the most important responsibility he shoulders.

He tries to make her understand this.

"You took her sightseeing, Toby," she says, uninterested in the finer arguments he has been making about art and obligation.

"You've seen Washington," he says, as if that explains everything.

*

A while ago he was enjoying the hockey game with Sam, and now there's plutonium burning in a tunnel in Idaho, and he's stuck in this surreal meeting. She's giving him a look that says he's still in trouble but he's too tired to figure out how to make it right.

Josh says, "There's no electoral math they can come up with, none, that says it's not worth exploring replacing the Vice President on the ticket."

She looks at him, and he looks at her, and she sinks into her seat. It's going to be a long night.

They're at their best when they're working like this though, and it's not long before he's sitting beside her, having paced his way around the room. She takes his General Tso's chicken and when Josh asks who'll get into the Presidential race this late she turns to him and smiles a little.

"John Hoynes," he says and smiles back, glad they are finally on the same page.

He's not in the mood for Bill Fisher's truculence.

"CJ will announce them tomorrow from the podium," he says because this is their space and he's feeling territorial.

He shuffles a little in her doorway after they leave Leo's office, looking in at her and then down at his feet.

"I have work to do, Toby," she says, turning away. And so he can feel the absence of her in his apartment that night, but he no longer fears that it's permanent.

*

She's cracking wise this morning, making jokes about Freedonia and singing to herself. He pales a little when she reads them the news about Saudi Arabia, and Sam gives him a look that suggests he ought to know how to deal with her. He learned this lesson the hard way, and so he shrugs his shoulders.

"Let's get a good spot."

And in the moment before she responds to Steve she pauses and looks over at him. Unrepentant.

On Tuesday he runs out of things to do, and finds himself waiting for her at the front door. Unoccupied. He knows this makes him irredeemably pathetic, but she's been jumpy about something and he's going to keep invading her space until she tells him what it is.

He finds himself gabbling at her, and she's giving him this incredulous look, so he gives up and lets her steal his coffee and retreats to his office. All of a sudden he wants to take her away from this. He finds himself telling Ludmilla Koss instead, because he wouldn't have the words to say it to her.

"I've seen pictures," he says, "of people out there in the world and they all look like they're glad they are."

He really is having an unusual day, and looking at pictures of scuba divers with Koss would be an unworthy substitute for what he really wants.

He's standing outside the Oval when she emerges with Ron, and his skin becomes cold. It could be nothing, he lies to himself, but the look on the President's face indicates that it is everything, and that Toby better figure it out.

She comes over that night, and even her red dress doesn't lend any color to her face. She describes the emails, and her conversation with the President. She tells him that Donovan said she was being "hunted".

He freely admits he was compulsive after Rosslyn.

Vengeful.

He has a file an inch thick in his bottom desk drawer left over from his vendetta. He knows many things about that night and its aftermath that she's not aware of. Now he feels conflicted because he knows Donovan killed the man who shot Josh, but he doesn't want him near her anymore.

He pours her a drink and kisses the inside of her wrist, and he doesn't tell her it will be okay. Even she would doubt the veracity of that claim.

*

He thought he would like Finland, but he hated every second, and he wants more than anything to go home and lose "Secret Agent Man", as she has taken to calling Donovan. Instead they wind up in her office watching the tape. The look he gives her is wistful, wishful, and she raises an eyebrow in warning.

The headache behind his eyes that developed somewhere over the Atlantic when the President decided to describe the sky as "xanthic" and then elaborate on the word's origins won't go away, regardless of the number of Tylenol he swallows.

She makes it up to him as they lie on the floor eating takeout pizza and making up new versions of the Democratic Convention based on reality television. The idea of locking key members of the DNC in a house with no furniture appeals to him, and he almost forgets the suited figure outside her door.

The next day they're watching the tape for the hundredth time and Gianelli points out that, "every campaign has one in the drawer."

"We didn't," she says with surprise, and he doesn't look at her as both he and Sam respond that they did. He only vaguely remembers the time when he didn't tell her everything, and he'd rather he didn't remember it at all.

He feels a certain guilty relief that she goes to Gianelli with Sam's mistake instead of coming to him. The mortification evident on Sam's face is like a body-blow and he can't always be angry about his idealism.

But he is worried about the distance she's increasingly putting between them.

That and the expression of frustration Donovan made as he was passing, moments after she left her office.

*

He wonders if he will spend the rest of his life yawning through mindless meetings in the Roosevelt Room.

Josh says, "It's five hours of King Henrys with musical interludes and a dinner break."

"I think you should come to my house and perform it for me," she quips, and it occurs to him that this is the sort of jibe which, yesterday, would have been reserved for him. He shoves his papers in a folder and says, "We're done."

She calls him later and asks him to bring over the notes he's made on the President's remarks for New York. He says he will email them to her, and is met with silence.

"I said..."

"I heard what you said," she sighs into the phone, "I just don't want to use...it's just that..."

He waits for an explanation.

"Just get Ginger to walk them over," she says.

"Yeah," he sighs, and she hangs up the phone. So he yields, sliding the notes into an envelope and staring for a moment at his computer screen.

And he's trying to mend Sam, and then the President jumps up and down all over Josh and welfare starts to slip through their fingers, and he needs more hours in the day. So that he can spend at least some of them lying awake at night wondering what is wrong with her.

*

She stays shut in a stateroom for the entire flight back from New York. The President asks him twice to go to her, and eventually gives up. Toby wonders how much of her pain is written on his face.

Zero hour. The twilight zone.

He tells the driver at Andrews to take them to her address. She leans into her door like she's in another zip code, and he longs for that moment before when they sat side by side in a darkened theatre, her arm pressed gently against his.

"It's not as if I knew him, Toby," she says defensively, but she gets into bed still wearing her gown and his tuxedo jacket.

And so he goes into her bathroom, and he finds that same brown pencil, and he writes a letter to her on her mirror, the least permanent way of touching her he can find.

He has no platitudes, no condolences. He has reached the end of the alphabet again, the zenith, and realizes that he still has found no way to contain or protect her. That somehow he has failed her. So he quotes another man's words and leaves it at that.

"I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote."

He closes her front door softly on his way out.

 

**Author's Note:**

> For Luna, because she asked for it, and betaed it so beautifully. Thanks to kelpie, for not disowning me (yet). And thanks for the camaraderie, which makes it all worthwhile. Aleph and Tav are the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The quote at the end is from Samuel Johnson (1775).


End file.
